


Oh, Gingersnap!

by Saraste



Category: Mercy Thompson Series - Patricia Briggs
Genre: Baking, Boys Being Boys, Christmas, F/M, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Shortbread, Slice of Life, gingerbread cookies, gingersnaps, silliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 11:51:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2811038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saraste/pseuds/Saraste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We were baking. Baking was my comfort zone, the one thing that soothed me when everything else in my life was going from bad to all too often worse. There was nothing soothing in what I was currently experiencing, though. Partly I had myself to blame for not interfering quicker and preventing at least some of the mess.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oh, Gingersnap!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nokomis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nokomis/gifts).



> Hi! Hope you'll like this. I had a little trouble with the Mercyverse but I think the end result isn't half bad. Also I have no idea about baking any cookies but gingerbread ones and the way their baking is depicted in this fic is the way we do it in Finland so... yeah. Also now I've written about Ben knowing how to bake gingersnaps (which I always thought to be an invented cookie from Harry Potter) I want to try baking them myself. Adam wasn't also supposed to appear but made his way in at the very end. I think it was cute. I tried to go as gen as the source material allows but because Warren and Kyle and are naughty boys I didn't quite make it.
> 
> So, here's hoping you like this bit of Christmassy fluff. ^.^

 

We were baking. Baking was my comfort zone, the one thing that soothed me when everything else in my life was going from bad to all too often worse. There was nothing soothing in what I was currently experiencing, though. Partly I had myself to blame for not interfering quicker and preventing at least some of the mess.

 

The kitchen, now mine even when it too often didn’t feel like it, was a chaos of usually pristine surfaces now covered with flour, pieces of egg shell and unbaked gingerbread cookie dough. There were also three grown men partially covered with flour amidst the chaos, one giggling teenage girl and myself slowly losing patience and wondering how baking for Christmas had come to this. I reminded myself it was only the 18th, so there was time to do ‘damage control’ if this ended up as much of a disaster result wise as I feared.

 

Jesse smiled innocently at me, holding a wooden spoon in one hand and a bowl in the other, supposedly mixing cookie dough but really just gleefully taking in the chaos. Ben was sullen and almost pouty, trying to cover his subtle delight in being allowed _to participate_ , from where he was looking down at the gingerbread batter, trying to beat it into submission with a rolling pin and failing because he had used too much flour to prevent sticking instead of too little this time around. There was flour in his hair and all over his apron-front. Kyle was grimacing over the flour in his hair and jeans, despite the big ‘Kiss The Cook’ apron over his clothes which, though leisure-wear were still designer. Warren was by him, trying to hold in his smile but there was no hiding the pleased smile in his eyes. They had ostensibly been helping Ben, which explained the flour which Ben had shaken off of his rolling bin in disgusted disappointment. Kyle was also supposed to have been making butter cookies but had abandoned the mixing of the batter to observe Ben’s failings.

 

“Okay, enough,” I tried to sound more authoritative than exasperated, more the Alpha’s mate than their friend. But they were ruining baking for me! Not Jesse, because she knew how to bake, but the men who, despite volunteering to help out apparently had no prior experience in baking. I turned to face them. “Seriously? Why did you tell me you could bake when you _clearly_ can’t?”

 

Warren shuffled his feet. “I often saw my mama doin’ it, seemed to be easy enough.” So, apparently his second hand observations were from about a hundred years ago. I couldn’t say no to him after hearing that.

 

“I am of the opinion that you can never have too many skills,” Kyle informed me, “and I _can_ cook, which apparently does not translate into baking.” I looked at him sharply and he gave me an innocent smile in return.

 

“I’ve never baked gingerbread cookies,” Ben said with his soft English accent, “but I _can_ bake.”

 

Salvation! I looked at Ben specifically, reading him quite easily now that we’d spent more time with one another, now that he trusted me with some of his deep dark secrets. “What can you bake then?”

 

“Shortbread. Fruitcake, though it’s too late to bake that now, maybe next year? Gingersnaps.” He looked down at the too-floury dough which refused to settle to become a sheet where we could cut cookies out with the assortment of cookie cutters in various shapes which I had laid out on the edge of the big table.

 

I went to him while Jesse continued to mix her batch of unseasonal chocolate chip cookies behind me. “Well, we can try those later if we have the ingredients but now I can help you with the gingerbreads, okay?”

 

He gave me one of his rare smiles. “Thank you, Mercy.”

 

We put the too-floured bit of dough back into the fridge to cool after taking out a fresh cold lump of it. “What you want to do,” I demonstrated, the three men gathered about me while Jesse was giving us a big giggly smile, “is sprinkle just a little bit of flour onto the table,” which I did. Then I plonked the dough onto the floured tabletop.

 

I turned to Ben and offered him the rolling pin and nodded at the flour. “Then you flour the rolling pin, not too much,” I warned when Ben was just about to go overboard again, “and then you roll it,” he did, “and then you turn your rolled lump,” I demonstrated, “just so. And repeat. I’ll tell you when it starts to be too thin.”

 

Ben rolled the pin _so_ carefully and almost too gently but got the hang of it soon enough while I coached him through the process of making the lump become a sheet. He didn’t forget to flip it between rolls and it didn’t stick onto the table (which had been the fate of try #1, while #2 had been over-floured) and wasn’t too thin.

 

“Right! And now for the fun part!” I declared. I’d already readied baking sheets for the cookies and covered them with parchment paper so the cookies wouldn’t stick.

 

Jesse joined us, having finished with her cookies which were baking in the over just now. “I want the heart!” she announced, blushing just a little bit. I was thinking she might take the big one and write Gabriel’s name on it with icing and then repeat the process until the boy had more gingerbread cookies with his name on them than what he could be expected to stomach. He would eat all of them anyway, with some of the chocolate chip cookies thrown in as I knew he shared Jesse’s fondness for them. She did snatch the biggest heart-shaped cookie cutter, as predicted.

 

Kyle appropriated the wolf with a snicker at Warren, who rolled his eyes while taking hold of a crescent moon shaped one while Ben chose a Christmas tree. I didn’t take one because there wasn’t enough room for me to press cookies out of the rolled dough. I’d get in with the next sheet.

 

“Now you want to press hard and wriggle the cutter a bit before lifting,” I started while Jesse just went for it, “like Jesse’s doing.”

 

The absurdity of telling three grown men how to make gingerbread cookies was not lost on me. Kyle seemed to have exaggerated his failings, like I’d intuited earlier, as his fingers seemed to be a little too used to this kind of thing. Warren seemed like a kid with a new toy and Ben was lost between a frown and a barely-there smile.

 

In five minutes we had a baking sheet covered with somewhat-neatly-cut cookies, thankfully either Warren nor Ben had chosen anything with many thin edges or the like, which usually tore if you didn’t cut them just so, or got a bit burned while baking. The oven pinged just as if on cue and we changed Jesse’s chocolate chips for the gingerbreads in no time flat. While the first batch was baking Warren got his turn in trying to roll the dough. Kyle helped, pressing himself against Warren’s back and guiding his hands this way and that. It was rather cute but at the same time bordering just on the edge of being inappropriate for Jesse’s eyes. It was enough to make Ben shuffle minutely as he noticed what Kyle was doing to Warren and vice versa.

 

The first batch was ready just at the right time for me to announce: “They’re ready, I’m getting them out!” thus breaking Warren and Kyle and their … _rolling_ apart. Both were blushing when I turned around and Ben was sniggering. Jesse was either busy or busying herself with the chocolate chip cookies with her Christmas red bangs covering her face where she was bending down to look at them. The shade of her hair was very seasonal, we’d had to mix two shades of red to get it just right and I’d helped her apply it the night before

 

Warren looked right at me, straightening his Christmas sweater and adjusting his waist apron, raising his shoulders while offering me a desperate ‘what did you expect’-type of grin. Kyle just looked smug.

 

I sighed. “Now,” I jumped back into the topic of cookies, disregarding whatever issues Warren and Kyle had in their pants, “these need to cool. That dough seems ready for pressing cookies so we’ll do the second batch, this time I want to press some out too.”

 

The boys, men, obliged, giving me room while Jesse opted out, rattling the cupboards for a tin for her cookies. I couldn’t instruct her to the right one as the kitchen was still in Christy-order because I hadn’t had the energy and time to arrange it my way. It still felt wrong that my kitchen, and the whole house, was still arranged like Adam’s ex had left it. I’d do something about that one day but this was not that day. This was baking day and things seemed to be picking up after the chaos of the first fifteen or so minutes.

 

I picked out a lamb shaped cutter and made Warren laugh and Ben too, if just a little. The shame shape hung about my neck cast in silver.

 

After that the rest of the gingerbreads came out fine and Kyle accidentally dropped his facade when he expertly and without help rolled the dough into an evenly thick sheet when it was his turn. He had the decency to blush when he lifted his head to look at our expressions. “I never did say I couldn’t roll dough, did I?”

 

“Kyle Brooks, you are a menace,” I told him.

 

“I try,” he quipped back, cocking his hips into a jaunty pose and holding the pin like a stroppy fifties house-wife on an ad for baking goods. We all burst out laughing.

 

All in all it was a success in the end and when we’d finished tidying up we tucked into the results of our labor with glasses of milk in tow. Adam came in, not suddenly because everyone had heard him approach even Jesse, when I was dipping a sheep-shaped gingerbread cookie into my milk.

 

“Want a bite?” I asked, holding the somewhat soggy cookie up while he was taking in the scene, especially Jesse’s new hair which he’d not seen having been away overnight, making me miss him, which had instigated the impromptu Christmas cookie baking day which had almost become a disaster. “I made them with the boys. Kyle taught Warren how to roll the dough. And Ben made shortbread and gingersnaps; did you know he knows all sorts of British Christmas baking recipes? You _have_ to try them!”

 

“Sure,” Adam smiled at me, took a nibble of the cookie and hummed approvingly. Then he kissed me, his kiss being just as sweet. It was a cook baking day after all.

 

%MCEPASTEBIN%


End file.
